First impressions review: Blanca & Roja, by Anna-Marie McLemore
I read ‘Wild Beauty’ last year and loved it, so I’ve been interested to check out McLemore’s other books. This one has a lot of similarities, being kind of a cross between a fairytale and a Latin American magical realism book, with queer characters and gorgeous nature descriptions. However, ‘Blanca & Roja’ feels a lot more “cluttered” to me. I like most of the things it is trying to do, it just feels like the book is too short to do them all justice.
There are four POV characters, compared to the two in ‘Wild Beauty’. The titular Blanca and Roja are sisters from the del Cisne family. As the name (“of the swans”) suggests, the family is under a curse: In every generation there will be two daughters, but one of them will turn into a swan. Blanca is blonde and sweet, while Roja has black-red hair1 and a prickly temper, but the two love each other and have been trying to trade traits so that the swans won’t know who to take and will take neither. They – the darker Roja in particular – also have to deal with racism and superstitious avoidance by the majority-white town where they live. Then there are a pair of friends, Barclay/Yearling and Page. Page is a non-binary trans boy whose family doesn’t really understand him/her, while Barclay’s family is rich and prominent but kind of shady and weirdly encouraging of violent fights between him and his cousin. The two boys undergo their own animal transformations that bring them in contact with the sisters. Essentially, the tale is a mash-up of ‘Swan Lake’ with the Grimm fairytale ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ (no relation to the better known ‘Snow White’ story). I want to try and dissect the plot lines and themes below, but since that involves **spoilers**, duck out now – or, um, ‘swan off’? - if you don’t want that!
1. The description of its color is somewhat inconsistent but seems somewhere in the range that blackberries can be.
The strongest part of this story is probably the relationship between the two sisters. Roja has gotten it into her head that she’s the one the swans are destined to take. This seems logically a bit odd to me, since the pale and elegant Blanca is more like people’s stereotypical idea of a swan – though Roja has more of a real swan’s fiery temper! However, it still works because she’s internalized the way that humans in her town, and even in her family, value her less. If she’s less what a girl “should” be, she reasons, of course the swans will decide to not let her stay a girl. Blanca tries to fight this mindset, concocting rituals with Roja to show that they are the same. But when the society around you treats life as a zero-sum game (for one of you to win, the other must lose) it is hard to maintain that solidarity. When Blanca learns of a way she could save herself, she should tell her sister. She doesn’t, because she’s afraid it will fuel Roja’s insecurities. But that, of course, leads to Roja thinking her sister is trying to betray her when she finds out!
I also enjoyed Page’s story, which is apparently based on the author’s husband2. It pairs well with the revelation we got at the start of the book that the curse respects one’s self-identified gender, rather than one’s sex assigned at birth! Later, one of the sisters notes that their trans girl relative who was the second daughter in a previous generation was recognized as such fairly easily by the humans, too, because she was so obviously girly. But while Page prefers boy clothes and considers herself a boy, he refuses to be fully tied down to masculinity, and her parents and the other townsfolk (who like to put things in neat boxes) find that confusing. Blanca, though, has always liked Page and can get behind a boy being a “she” sometimes! And the apple orchard scene, OMG:
“I set my hand over hers. My teeth broke the skin, releasing the scent of gardenias and citrus trees. The spray of juice, still chilled from the river, bloomed into the taste of grapefruit and raw sugar. I swallowed and opened my eyes to Page’s shy smile…The bite had exposed a circle of fruit, bright and pink as French tulips. ‘It’s not your lipstick.’ Page’s mouth fit into the space mine had made. She bit it in almost the same place. The fruit stayed just as pink.”
2. The author themself also identifies as nonbinary, though I’m not sure if that was the case yet when this was written, since it isn’t mentioned in the notes
Barclay’s storyline, however, feels a little out of place. For one thing, it is brutal in a way that nothing else in the story really is: He ends up partially losing sight in one eye because of how hard his cousin hit him, and yet feels shame for beating that cousin back! And why all this animosity? Well…real estate scams, apparently. His family were selling plots of land in the middle of nowhere to gullible people and the cousin didn’t care about the morality of the situation and just didn’t want Barclay to spill the secret. Which is bad, sure, but doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the other themes of the book! However, I do like Barclay and Roja’s relationship and the way he loves her for the prickly rose that she is.
Another thing that bugged me was that, unlike ‘Wild Beauty’, where the source of the curse is revealed as we find out how it can be broken…we never find out why the del Cisnes are cursed! It definitely has something to do with a desire for control on the swans’ part, because they won’t accept both girls voluntarily turning into swans. But there is no explanation for why the swans are being such assholes, or whether the curse is broken for good or not in the end.
Maybe because there were four teenage POVs instead of two, or maybe because they were making much more frustrating decisions and not talking to anyone to a greater degree than in ‘Wild Beauty’…but I was really glad to meet the two Sapphic grandmas! Page and Barclay’s grandmas are a couple, which is cute, and they also bring a welcome touch of wisdom to this circus of angsty young idiots.
Overall
recommendation: A good book,
especially if you are looking for some trans/nonbinary representation in a
fairytale. But not something I'm going to be pestering everyone to read (though please DO read 'Wild Beauty'!).
